The Naples Daily News caught up with Florida Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink at the airport in Tallahassee for a sit-down interview about her candidacy for Florida governor.

Chief Financial Officer for the State of Florida and Democratic candidate for Florida governor Alex Sink, center, is swarmed by journalists asking questions about the race for governor as she leaves the Cabinet meeting Tuesday, September 28, 2010 in Tallahassee. Lexey Swall/Staff

Alex Sink Rick Scott Governor of Florida

Candidate for Florida governor Alex Sink addresses attendees during a town-hall style meeting at the Ritz Carlton in Sarasota, FL. on Thursday, June 17, 2010 at the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors/Florida Press Association annual conference. BRIAN BLANCO/Special to the Daily News

TALLAHASSEE - "I never in my life thought I would be a candidate," Sink said in an interview with the Daily News. "I've always been interested in policy and the political process, and I've just been one of those who have supported my favorite candidates."

This candidate has humble beginnings.

Coming up from nothing, with a family that struggled to balance the checkbooks, finally reaching the top of the business world, now the candidate wants to be Florida's next governor.

By now, a lot of voters probably recognize that narrative as belonging to Republican candidate Rick Scott, but it turns out his Democratic rival, Alex Sink, shares a similar story of hard work and hitting the big time.

But while Sink, 62, the state's current Chief Financial Officer, is working to make herself visible through statewide television commercials, many people are still in the dark about who she is.

"In Florida, we generally don't know much about Cabinet-level officials when they're in office, except for the governor," said Daniel Smith, a University of Florida political science professor who specializes in elections. "Alex Sink is a newcomer to politics. She's not a newcomer to the political scene, however, with her husband having run for governor himself in 2002."

Her husband, Bill McBride, a Tampa attorney, lost a bid for governor to Jeb Bush, who won a second term in 2002.

Smith points to polls showing that some voters don't even know whether Sink is a man or a woman. Alex is short for Adelaide, and for the record, yes, she is a woman.

Not just that, but if elected, she would be Florida's first-ever female governor.

"I never in my life thought I would be a candidate," Sink said in an interview with the Daily News. "I've always been interested in policy and the political process, and I've just been one of those who have supported my favorite candidates."

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Alex Sink was born in Mount Airy, N.C., where she grew up on the family farm. The Sink family grew corn, tobacco and soybeans, and raised hogs and cattle — "whatever my dad could make money at," Sink said.

She attended Wake Forest University, in Winston-Salem, N.C., majored in mathematics, and spent three years teaching in West African schools after graduation.

Together, those experiences of helping her father run the farm and teaching overseas became two of what she calls the most formative experiences of her young life.

Every month, she said, she sat with her father to write checks for the fertilizer bill, the gas bill, the machine shop bill.

"Then, he would have me add up all of the checks we had written to make sure we had enough money in the bank," she said. "I thought I was learning about farming, but what I was really learning, is I was learning about small business."

Fast forward 40 years or so, and Sink was the bank.

After moving to Florida 26 years ago, she rose to the top position in Bank of America's Florida operations. She retired from banking roughly 10 years ago, and settled with her family in Thonotosassa, a rural area outside Tampa.

As Chief Financial Officer of the state, she draws a $111,000 annual salary, and in December, she reported her net worth at $9.2 million.

Smith, at the University of Florida, said this part of Sink's narrative might not ring so true with voters.

"You know, being a millionaire banker is not something that's going to allow voters to feel warm and fuzzy toward," Smith said.

Then again, Sink is going up against a self-made businessman who listed more than $200 million in assets at the outset of the campaign.

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Sink said she finally considered a run as Chief Financial Officer when several friends approached her five years ago and told her Florida was in desperate need of someone "looking out for our money."

Much like her rival, Scott, she said she saw problems with the political system in Florida, and wanted to jump in and fix things.

Coming from the business world, Sink said she was more than a little surprised to see just how state government runs.

She recalls when a glitch was discovered in the state's accounting department early in her tenure. She said she asked to see the department's last audit, in order to find out if the glitch had been caught previously.

It turned out the department hadn't undergone an audit in 10 years, Sink said.

"Well, coming from a financial background like I did, I was stunned," she said. "I could not believe there had been so little oversight over a department that, you know, wrote so many checks every year."

David Clark, who has worked extensively with Sink's staff as a Cabinet aide in the Department of Environmental Protection, said Sink brings a CEO's mentality to running the state's finances. Meanwhile, she has brought together a staff with diverse backgrounds, said Clark, who is set to enter Officer Candidate School with the U.S. Army.

"The staff she has around her epitomize her," Clark said. "She's brought in many different types of people from not only the public, but the private sectors, many different realms of business, from finance to communications. She's surrounded herself with a very diverse group of people and it's worked well for her."

"She really does proscribe to that economic perspective, from the stimulus, health care, these higher taxes, she's very much in line with Obama, (Speaker of the House Nancy) Pelosi, Washington Democrats," Scott campaign spokesman Joe Kildea said.

At the same time, said state Rep. Alan Williams, D-Tallahassee, Sink has been able to bridge the gap between Republicans and Democrats. It is something he has seen firsthand, particularly through his work as a ranking member on the Government Operations and Appropriations Committee, he said. It would be an important skill, given the fact that Sink would be working with a Republican-controlled Legislature, if elected.

"On a number of occasions, CFO Sink brought proposals to the table that Republicans supported," he said.

It is this sensibility — an eye for business and a dexterity in state politics — that Sink promises to bring to bear if she is elected governor.

However, it is Sink's experience in state government that Scott's campaign wants to use against her. While it is hard to describe Sink as a career politician — a label that doomed Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum, Scott's opponent in the Republican primary — the Scott campaign is trying to tag her as a longtime insider who is in lock-step with President Barack Obama.

"She really does proscribe to that economic perspective, from the stimulus, health care, these higher taxes, she's very much in line with Obama, (Speaker of the House Nancy) Pelosi, Washington Democrats," Scott campaign spokesman Joe Kildea said.

In order to connect with independents and moderates, the Scott campaign believes Sink is trying to distance herself from Obama. She skipped a joint appearance with him at an August fundraiser in Miami. A pledge on her website to "work with President Obama's administration" on Everglades restoration was changed to "Alex will provide the strong leadership that's needed to expedite federal approval of restoration projects," the St. Petersburg Times reported.

Sink has tried to turn around those efforts by Scott's campaign, firing back with her own commercial accusing Scott of being fixated on Obama.

"You know what I'm doing? I'm running to be the governor of the state of Florida," she said in an interview. "And so, that's why when you look on my website, there's nothing intentional (about the absence of Obama.) ... Florida desperately needs a governor that's going to attack our Florida challenges, and think about Florida solutions as opposed to a candidate who seems to be obsessed just by Washington."

* * * * *

Meanwhile, Sink's campaign wants to frame her as one of the good guys who already came into state government as an outsider, and managed to shake things up.

They tout accomplishments such as her office's shut-down of an annuity fraud scam that returned more than $1.2 million to seniors. As part of the same Safeguard Our Seniors initiative, she pushed for the passage of bipartisan legislation that would increase penalties for people convicted of annuity fraud.

And having a spouse who ran for state office — the same state office she is seeking — has some benefits, too.

"Neither of us had ever run for office, and we sort of created that (2002) campaign at our kitchen table, literally," her husband said. "Alex was very involved in that campaign. She saw the mistakes — and the good things, too."

But, McBride also paints his wife as a systematic planner, and someone who makes things happen for herself.

"Her style is very collaborative," he said. "She seeks a lot of information and a lot of opinions. A lot of collaborative people like that aren't decisive. But, once she gets all of that information, she'll make a decision and she'll move forward."

At the same time, Sink is still getting the hang of the politics game, it seems. While adept at taking questions in a structured setting, she falters a bit more amid a gaggle of reporters following a Cabinet meeting or press conference. She is still learning the political art of walking and talking, dealing with an onslaught of questions while being ferried from meeting to meeting.

At a press conference inside a Tallahassee job placement firm Tuesday, Sink arrived on a tight schedule between meetings to talk up her plan for tax breaks to new businesses and strengthening education to create more competent graduates. Workforce Plus, a job placement firm, sits in a run-down strip mall two miles outside downtown Tallahassee, where job applicants looking for work line the waiting room chairs.

Sink bypassed the job seekers without a word or a handshake, heading for the room with the television cameras and Republican state Sen. Alex Villalobos, who endorsed Sink the day before. She talked up her plans, before heading back out the door, again passing by the people she is promising to help.

But in an election season in which both candidates admit jobs are the top issue, and polls vary on whether Sink or Scott is ahead, every vote is going to count. It is a race that could turn out to be a matter of who you know, or rather, how well you know a candidate.